Kacey Musgraves infectious country-pop — as well as her love of sequins and disco — garnered her a huge gay following, solidifying her status as a rising gay icon. During an event at the New Yorker Festival this week, Musgraves was asked about her LGBTQ fanbase, and how it felt to have attracted such a huge queer following when country music and gay people don't usually mix.

“What I think it is — someone told me this recently and it broke my heart — they said, 'I’ve grown up loving country music and I grew up gay in a small town, and country music has always felt like a big party that I wasn’t invited to.' Oh my god, you’re invited to my party,” she said. “It’s crazy that a certain kind of a person could feel excluded from a genre that’s so real — or supposed to be so real. That has always really pissed me off. Because I love the genre so much, I felt, 'Well fine, maybe I’ll just have an all-gay audience.'”

Musgraves explained that her affection for the queer community began when a good friend came out to her when they were younger, only after they'd moved out of their conservative small town. “I was the first person he told,” she recalled. “I had an idea, it was an unspoken thing, but it was so painful and hard for him to tell me, even though I was totally fine with it. Thinking about him and all of those other kids who are like, 'I love country music, why can’t I be a part of this? Why isn’t my narrative included?' I don’t know.”